Shake it Out
by Pseudometapath
Summary: It's always darkest before the dawn. One-Shot.


Dante was tired. His head hurt. And he was surrounded by beer bottles.

Some of them were empty; some of them were leaking their contents onto the carpet, creating pools of wet stickiness across the floor of the dingy trailer, sinking into the shag and permeating the air with its scent. Alcohol took a long time to settle into his bloodstream, but he'd splurged and bought three cases of whatever and downed a little over half of them; a dozen gleaming bottles sat stacked in a pyramid on his bedside table, all unopened, all inviting. He tried to sit up to take another one and moaned at how much energy the small action drained from his wasted, sleep deprived body.

_Yeah_,he thought as he slid back into the familiar depression his body had left in the mattress, the same depression he slept in every night; _Yeah. I think I'm drunk._ And then he opened his mouth, his tongue heavy, and said it out loud to no one, his delivery halting and slurred:

"I'm dru...jeez. I'm...I'm drunk. _Drunk._"

He finished the sentence with an air of finality, as though confirming it, solidifying the fact to the nothing in his bedroom, made it somehow less pathetic. He was drunk, but he was damn sure of it; he was drunk on _his_ terms, and shouldn't that count for something? He thought so, alone in his room, and with no one there to contradict him it felt like the truth.

It wasn't for another thirty minutes and a few more Keystones that it started. His eyes got heavy; his body felt like it had glued itself to the bed without his permission. His tongue was sticky-his fingers were lead. He became aware of the fact that he was essentially trapped by his own habits and then his mind became a haze.

Then came the worst part about being completely and totally drunk; the _thinking_.

Dante drank to escape thought. There were things he didn't want to think about at the end of the day and drowning the thoughts, especially the rogue ones, in alcohol and sleep was consequential but it was easy, so, so easy. But here, in the haze of intoxication, when he couldn't move, _couldn't_ sleep, there was a stream-of-consciousness that hid during the day when he was fully conscious and could quell it; here and now, it faced no resistance. Here it was free.

As he lay there, too tired and lazy and shitfaced to do anything about it, the regrets came out, collecting right there in his mind's eye like old friends. The shrinks, the psychiatrists and psychologists and-he hated the word-_counselors_ all wanted their pound of flesh, but the things he'd kept to himself were here, and they were unfolding like a paper crane pinched together the wrong way, tearing at creases that weren't in the right place or shouldn't have been there at all.

And he _hated_ it, _all_ of it. It reminded him of a time when he'd used a kiddy ride, a white horse frozen in mid-gallop with wide, staring eyes and chipping paint, outside of a supermarket at the age of seven, and he'd hopped down from the ride after a few minutes and gotten his pants leg stuck on a crack in the saddle. He was naive back then, dangerously so, and his mind had jumped to the absurd conclusion that he was stuck forever; he'd known with some level of certainty at the time that he would _always_ be dragging that horse around, even if it was connected by nothing but a few strands of thread. And now he felt his thoughts weighing down on his brain, on his hands, like he'd believed the horse would weigh on _him,_ forever and ever.

And then he felt a realization. It wasn't sudden and it wasn't startling; it washed over him, slowly at first and then it was as though he'd known it all along, from the very beginning, and only now was it surfacing, as though the time was, inexplicably, just right.

That day at the supermarket, he hadn't stood there and waited for someone to help him. He'd ripped his leg away, snapping the thread cleanly in two and freeing himself of that burden. The pants had a hole afterwards, but now Dante felt like his seven-year-old self had known that one day the memory of that innocent event would change him, would change _everything._

Dante pushed himself out of bed. It hurt, God it hurt his head, and he was dizzy and nauseous and a whole slew of other things, but he righted himself with heavy hands. He stood and shivered, aware of how cold it was, and he gathered the last of the unopened bottles in his arms. He nudged the flimsy screen door of the trailer open with his foot and stepped outside into the frigid night air. It was pitch black outside, the sky blank with that sheer darkness that comes before dawn. He went out to the back and put the bottles in a heap on a patch of dry dirt and weeds. It wasn't the last time he'd see them, he knew; the threads would pull and leave a hole, but this felt like a start. _A good one,_ he thought, and it was the truth.

He popped open the first bottle and poured it into the tangled grass at his feet. He would stay up all night if he had to, but he was going to bury that horse in the ground.

* * *

**Author's Note: Hope you guys liked :) Leave a review for me, would you kindly, and tell me what you thought. I wrote this as part of a 10 Songs Fic Challenge, and the first song I got was Shake it Out by Florence + the Machine, so...here this is. I wrote this with DmC Dante in mind, but it could probably work either way. Again, hope you liked it :)**


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